Daily Links Aug 3

Making significant change is rarely easy and with climate change, think of SIGNIFICANT like so. So we need powerful, consistent and comprehensive messages to argue why we should change. Most of the media stories about the drought are of ‘triumph over tragedy’, the unstoppable power of nature’ and ‘there’s always been a changing climate and droughts’ which undermine the need for change. They present, to those looking, excuses as to why they don’t need to change. Thankfully The Guardian is different to ‘most’ of the media.

In 2014, a French television channel broadcast fictional weather reports envisioning temperatures in 2050. Just five years later, real weather forecasts show the future appears to have arrived decades early.

Eucalypts are dying in Victoria as the Earth’s temperature rises. But ecologists have come up with a homegrown solution that could see our native species weather climate change for a long time to come.

The City of Boroondara, through its recycling collection contractor Cleanaway, has been able to secure a contract with VISY to receive and process 100 per cent of the City’s kerbside recycling collections.

Queensland’s drought-wracked Granite Belt, home to the towns of Stanthorpe and Warwick, will finally have a secure water supply after the state government agreed to co-fund a new dam on the Severn River.

The wet tropics region that stretches across nearly 900,000ha of World Heritage-listed land covers a fraction of 1 per cent of Australia’s land mass, but is home to about 50 per cent of all the nation’s species. But with Australia’s star, the Great Barrier Reef, allocated a “game changing” $500 million in funding last year, there are fears the rainforest is becoming the neglected, poor cousin of the reef.

In this week’s Off the Record, we argue householders and businesses should get a refund for paying too much for water, BankSA’s chief spreads his wings and the $20 million local council secret that got out.

At just under 1,100 square kilometres, King Island is only a speck in the ocean on the map between Victoria and Tasmania. But the Bass Strait island boasts a renewable energy network that supplies 50 per cent of its needs.